This blog, inspired by "The Baby Bonding Book For Dads: Building a Closer Connection to Your Baby," talks about all the ways dads and children can bond. Here you can read news about the book, advice about parenting, and real-life stories of dads, moms, and babies

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

We eat processed crap that is nutritionally devoid and then "enriched" with everything the processing of the food took out of it.

News flash: cereal (even Cheerios and Special K, despite what you see on the TV ads) is not food. Poptarts aren't food (you already knew that). Granola bars aren't food. Anything wrapped in plastic with unreadable and unpronounceable ingredients does not count as food.

Don't make your baby's food out of a box or a jar or a plastic bag.

Instead, buy a yam, steam it, and mush it up. Feed that to your baby. And have some yourself.

We see moms and dads putting Coke in baby bottles. Or orange juice. Skip the juice altogether and let your baby drink water and breast milk. Formula, folks, also isn't food. It's nasty manufactured crap that companies are making a lot of money selling, so much so that they can afford to give it away for free in the hospital. These companies even get away with brainwashing new parents that their babies aren't getting enough breast milk.

Some studies are finding that processed baby food is even worse than junk food. Click here to read an article about this.

Unvaccinated children do not pose a threat to vaccinated children or their families. We all have a responsibility to keep each other's children safe. Choosing to not vaccinate or choosing an alternative vaccine schedule could be considered a rift in that contract. Medically, scientifically and statistically speaking, it is not. Honest people might disagree.

I have been a pediatrician for thirty years and have watched children receive all scheduled vaccines, some of the vaccines or receive no vaccines at all. I have seen every one of the illnesses against which we vaccinate. The last time I saw bacterial meningitis in a child was 1982 but the extreme rarity of this terrible disease means that it makes the news whenever a case occurs. Denying that childhood meningitis exists is dishonest. Equally dishonest is implying that it is a large threat to any of our children. I see kids with pertussis every year. I see children misdiagnosed with whooping cough far more often. Two years ago, the New York Times took note of this phenomenon:

I recently read an article, written in 2009 which chastised non-vaccinating parents because there had been 131 cases of measles in the U.S. in the first half of 2008 alone. And how many cases were there in the whole year? 134. The usual number? 62. Disingenuous reporting. An extra 72 cases of measles among 300,000,000 Americans made the papers every day or two for months and the LA Times writers dredge up the child who caught measles on a Swiss vacation one more time.

Yes, as mentioned, measles and other viruses can cause encephalitis. It's very, very rare. Implying otherwise could scare parents.

And, no, the law does not allow us to know which children have not received vaccines any more than it allows other invasions of privacy.

I have received hundreds of emails from people all over the country and the world reaching out to me and asking me to listen to them about vaccine issues and injuries because it seems that no one else will. I have permission from a mother to forward email she sent to me-with a picture-of her four month old daughter who received four vaccines and died shortly thereafter. I have dozens and dozens of similar emails and dozens of face-to-face encounters in my office with parents coming to me after what they considered to be vaccine damage to their children. I will not forward that email. It creates a different kind of fear that also doesn't serve the dialogue well.

I think that these possibly injured children and families represent one end of the bell shaped curve and that scary stories about meningitis in Minnesota (the first there in 18 years) represent the other end. (I do feel that the former end of the curve is far fuller than the latter but no proof exists. None.)

The LA Times stories were "fear-based" just as my forwarding these emails would have been.

The University of Michigan Law Review recently invited me to write a journal article about vaccines and tort law and you can read it here.

I sum up my law review presentation to parents every winter by telling them that the only way to avoid childhood illnesses is "reverse isolation" of your illness-free child. If you go to a two-year-old' s birthday party during the winter months . . . You will probably get sick.

Peripherally, let's all remember that it took fifty years or more, thousands of court cases and a lot of money to finally prove the connection between cigarettes and cancer. The three court cases showing no connection between vaccines and autism should make no headlines and should be an impetus to honest investigative journalism.

We have increased the number of vaccines and the combinations of vaccines given to babies and children. Adequate testing has not been done. I have seen a huge rise in the number of children with autism. Neither I nor any other doctors are hundreds of percent better at diagnosing this spectrum of developmental delay than ten or twenty years ago. The dramatic rise in the number of cases of autism spectrum disorders is attributable to something other than "reclassification" or better diagnosis.

While waiting for scientific proof, we have to tolerate families' completely legal and scientific desire to have or not have their children given vaccines according to the current schedule.

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About the authors

James di Properzio is a freelance writer and editor, specializing in making technical information interesting and accessible. He used to say he “probably wanted to have a kid … someday.” When his wife became pregnant, James worked from home which gave him the chance to become a more involved dad, despite the fact that he had never held an infant before. Now James and his wife, Jennifer Margulis, have four children.

Jennifer Margulis has eaten fried crickets in Niger, performed the cancan in America, and appeared on prime-time television in France. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Military History Quarterly, Ms Magazine, and dozens of other national magazines and newspapers. She is also the author of Why Babies Do That: Baffling Baby Behavior Explained; the award-winning anthology, Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love; and The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don't Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Before Their Bottom Line. A former Fulbright Scholar, she lives in Ashland, Oregon with her husband and four children.

About the Photographer

Christopher Briscoe photographs people from all walks of life, all over the world. His celebrity faces include Michael Douglas, Kathryn Zeta Jones, Kirk Douglas, Rob Lowe, Ray Charles, Bo Derek, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Based in the Pacific Northwest, he has published his photographs in Time magazine, USA Today, and The Los Angeles Times. Chris' portfolio www.chrisbriscoe.com is an example of his connection with people and the magic light he splashes upon them. Aside from the pleasure of photographing wonderful faces, Briscoe's greatest joy comes from being a dad to his son, Quincy.